John Hillcoat, director of The Road, sits down with Popular Mechanics to talk surviving the apocalypse and his problems with CGI.

John Hillcoat: Well, I had been a fan of Cormac McCarthy's work for a long time, and I was lucky enough to get a copy of the book before it was published. I was worried when I heard that it was an apocalyptic book, because I had all the clichés in my mind--the CGI spectacle of the big event. When I read the book, it was so fresh. It was so real. It was so familiar in a way. And the worlds Cormac creates are so visceral. So I couldn't say no. It was a dream come true. But I was also very anxious of the legacy of McCarthy. The task at hand, it was huge.

PM: How closely did you look at end-of-the-world scenarios?

JH: I didn't reference apocalyptic films. The references were really documentaries and photographs, because it felt familiar, this world. It wasn't the Statue of Liberty again. It was shopping carts with all your possessions, which is the homeless. So we looked at the real thing. The only difference is, the leftovers of Katrina, or 9/11, or Mount St. Helens--all these places, they weren't global. They were contained. But if you were in the middle of that circle and survived, it may as well have been global for you personally.

PM: What did you think caused the big event in The Road?

JH: I was actually enormously relieved that Cormac never explained that, because it made me think about my own worst fears. I think if he had explained it, then--if he said it was nuclear, that wasn't my worst fear, because I think that's a little less likely than the environment. I think the environment is the biggest threat mankind has ever faced. Also, by not stating what that event was, the spotlight goes straight onto the human dimension of how these people respond to the day-to-day survival. I was amazed that when you look at the aftermath of [disaster] photos, there's no immediate context. After these events, it's the media, from a position of comfort, that analyzes and explains [what happened]. None of that could operate on a real apocalyptic level. And even these smaller scale events we've all seen are chaotic, and all that's wiped out for that moment. And when you look at the aftermath, it becomes hard to tell the difference--was it man-made, was it not? Was it a natural event? Katrina is a combination of both nature and man, 9/11 was man, Mount St. Helens was nature. Anyway you want to slice it, the thing about the apocalypse is, since the beginning of time, it's the projection of mankind's worst fear. The day that, as a race, our number is up.

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I did ask Cormac [what the event was], of course--that was one of my first questions. Sometimes he would say, "Look, it's up to you to interpret, and for everyone else to interpret." But the route we took was a combo of man and nature, the environment out of control [because of] the excess and the mindlessness and egotism of man. It could, though, be a comet. I mean, that took out the dinosaurs.

PM: Why did you decide to shoot in real locations rather than a stage with a green screen?

JH: There are a couple of reasons. The primary reason is that it just felt so real when reading the book, and also the emotional journey. If those actors were working on a green-screen CGI stage, it would be a whole extra leap of imagination to try to reach. And I think [that] still, for all its greatness, CGI is alienating. I don't buy it. It still feels, to me, like a big video game. There's lots of CGI in our film, but we used it as a last resort, instead of starting with it.

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PM: Where were some of the places where you had to use CGI?

JH: Well, the approach was [to use CGI as] a last resort. So first, there was the realized landscapes of these places. We went to 50 locations, 80 percent exterior, middle of winter, all over Pennsylvania, down to New Orleans for the post-Katrina clean up, Oregon for the beach scenes and Mt. St. Helens in Washington state. Then there were the physical effects of spraying a lot of different colored paper and covering things. What we were left with was the pine trees back there in the shot are green. Or the trail that airplanes leave behind. Or birds flying through. No matter how desolate the landscape is, there's always signs of life. And we had to zap every sign of life. And of course the funny thing was, for the locals, they all thought we were insane, because we were trying to create a world without sun. So in the middle of winter, when it was a beautiful blue sky and bright sunshine, Javier Edwards, my spanish DP would be cursing, screaming--literally--at the blue sky. And we were devastated, because it was hard work working in the sun. And yet if it was raining sideways he would be stomping out there with a big smile, blessing the gods for what they brought us. It was inverse logic in that sense. When the weather was good, we tried to go inside; when the weather was bad, we went outside.

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PM: What about the locations that you chose that appealed to you?

JH: There was poignancy. If you're in New Orleans and they're still cleaning up the aftermath of Katrina, and half your crew has lived through that, literally, it creates an extra reality and meaning. I was also attracted to rural locations, because often the apocalyptic worlds we see are all urban iconography--the Statue of Liberty and high-rise skyscrapers. We wanted to get away from that and create a generic America that was very familiar. Mount St. Helens--the drama of seeing these huge trees that were all stripped bare and ripped out of the ground. In Pennsylvania we discovered an interstate freeway that had been closed since the end of the '60s, with tunnels. And luckily we also had access to a bridge that hadn't opened. The two ships sitting on the freeway is actual. Ironically, a lot of people say, "That's the CGI shot!" But it's 70mm IMAX footage shot two days after Katrina happened. That's all real. Those ships are sitting there. What we had to do was replace the bloody blue sky and the sun and get rid of the green grass to incorporate it into our world. The billowing clouds of smoke in some shots are actually 9/11. That smoke was seen from outer space, that's how huge that smoke tower was.

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PM: There's a pretty harrowing scene where The Man and The Boy are caught in an earthquake, and all these trees are falling around them. How did you pull that off?

JH: We had more meetings about that than anything else. Everyone was like, "Oh my god, how the hell are we going to have trees collapsing?" We were discussing special effects, hollow trees with pulley systems, all these elaborate things. Of course my production designer Chris Kennedy, who spent a lot of time in the countryside, has seen and has cut down trees, pointed out that you can't simulate the force and gravity of trees. That's one of the big drawbacks of CGI--gravity and weight are still not working. So of course we came to the most simple solution of all: We found some woods where they had to fell some trees. We employed some expert tree cutters; they could get within inches, say, "Okay, where do you want that one, we can do this one, it'll land here, we can do this one, it'll land there." It was 10 out of 10 accuracy. And we had multiple cameras, the most we used for any shot. The shaking was CGI, and we had to add in some extra debris. I was nervous about those trees. But I was told how to deal with it: The worst thing to do is run if a tree is falling because you'll lose your bearings. Trees go deceptively so far out that you could cross its line way off in the distance and it'll get you. The experts said if anything happens, the thing to do is just to watch it carefully. You've got seconds. Just watch it, and see where it's going, and then you can sidestep it. I thought I'd pass on that information.

PM: Speaking of survival techniques, obviously you had a great resource in the book, but did you research survival techniques, or even the medical impact of living under those conditions for that amount of time?

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JH: Oh yeah. The makeup department was in tune with all of that. I love research, as does my production designer, and the makeup department. We read loads of books and watched lots of videos. There's so much good stuff--The World Without Us, which is about what would happen when everything stops, and how quickly the whole system breaks down. And then Jared Diamond's book Collapse. They were great. So that was the route, as opposed to looking at pop culture things.

PM: It's interesting, because you're kind of going up against 2012, which is a big-budget CGI apocalypse film.

JH: But they're so different. I can appreciate the spectacle, and it's like a roller coaster ride. But on a storytelling level, I find it alienating.

PM: What did Cormac think of the movie?

JH: He loved it. The time where I thought the whole bottom of everything dropped out was straight after we screened the movie for Cormac for the first time. We were in a small screening room in New Mexico, lights went up, he quietly mumbled something about the men's room and disappeared. [He was gone for] 20 minutes. And I just thought, that's it, we're screwed. And then he came back and said it was great. Loved it. And we went out, in his old beat-up Cadillac. We had an hour lunch and he took us to the airport. That was such a relief.

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